Hard lessons

[Mikecheck123]

"When some one posts a picture of a tree after it has been chopped, defoliated, styled, or severely insulted on the top, or at the bottom, or both, and then asks if it would be OK, don't say anything until you see the before picture of the tree & of the soil etc.. Until I can estimate how much of an energy reserve the tree had, I am not going say anything. I've learned the hard way that in a lot of cases, the tree is dead, even though the owner doesn't see it yet."

Everything you say makes a lot of sense. Your paragraph above is a great description of what I call "bonsai demonstration syndrome". A visiting expert comes to a club meeting and does a "demonstration" in which a lot of drastic work is done to nursery stock or maybe a pre-bonsai. Styling, major branch and root pruning, wiring, repotting into a small bonsai pot, all in an hour and a half. Often the tree is raffled or given in a random drawing, sometimes to a beginner (like me). The transformation is astounding! From raw material a bonsai is created in front of our own eyes!

A few weeks or months later the tree dies.

Reminds me of Nigel Saunders. As undoubtedly cool as he is, the one objectively detrimental thing he does is unnecessary bare root repotting, which leads a lot of beginners to think that that's simply what you do when you work on a tree.

 

[19Mateo83]

Reminds me of Nigel Saunders. As undoubtedly cool as he is, the one objectively detrimental thing he does is unnecessary bare root repotting, which leads a lot of beginners to think that that's simply what you do when you work on a tree.

Nigel is very systematic in his approach, while I do enjoy watching him work, his approach is very universal one size fits all methods. All deciduous trees get defoliated, bare rooted then chopped hard. Sometimes it’s just defoliate and chopped hard.

 

[Cajunrider]

Nigel is very systematic in his approach, while I do enjoy watching him work, his approach is very universal one size fits all methods. All deciduous trees get defoliated, bare rooted then chopped hard. Sometimes it’s just defoliate and chopped hard.

Well. I enjoyed his videos and still do. He got me into trying the bare root thing. After watching one of his earlier video, I went out and bare rooted a crepe myrtle and chopped it hard just like Nigel did to his deciduous tree. The next year my tree died. I then watched another Nigel's video and in it he casually mentioned that the particular tree died as well. Live and learn!
Nowadays, I collected trees and sometimes bare root and chop them hard. However, I've learned to take care of them a bit better so they live

 

[Cajunrider]

Hard lesson on soil: No matter how much in a hurry you are, take time to get the right soil for your trees. From now on, even in emergency situation with a damaged tree, I will tent the tree or do whatever necessary to keep it in stasis for a day or two to get the right soil. One type of soil does not fit all. It is very much species dependent.

Last year I was too much in a hurry to pot a rescued acer and potted it in wetter soil. I didn't have enough of the bonsai mix I used for other acer so I mixed in quite a bit of potting soil. It grew well last year so I thought I was OK. In a year the bark in the potting soil broke down, the soil became soggy and my tree suffers. I wound up having to repot yesterday in a more appropriate soil mix for acer.

A week ago, I potted my rainbow eucalyptus, which I knew require a higher water retentive soil, yet I put it in free draining soil because I had a tub full of it. Wrong move! I should have taken the time to screen some more bark and put in the mix. Sure enough after the repot, the tree suffers and now I have to sandwich the pot in between two layers of stuff to keep the moisture level of the tree in check until it recovers enough to be repotted again.

Bad soil kills trees!!

 

[Cajunrider]

Hard lesson on discount trees: Unless I am familiar with the species and know exactly how to nurse it back to health BEFORE attempting to turn it to a bonsai, I won't bother. Looking back at my own track record, 90% of trees I got from the discount rack at the big box store did not survive to become any worthwhile bonsai. Know exactly what you are doing before heading to bargain bins. No matter how cheap it is, it gets expensive when we keep getting nearly dead trees and train them to become surely dead bonsai.

 

[Fidur]

Hard lesson on soil: No matter how much in a hurry you are, take time to get the right soil for your trees. From now on, even in emergency situation with a damaged tree, I will tent the tree or do whatever necessary to keep it in stasis for a day or two to get the right soil. One type of soil does not fit all. It is very much species dependent.

Oh, I seem to be very lucky with my climate. In my case, my universal soil (a mix of akadama and lava) fits all. My 75 trees (all kind of them, conifers, decidious, tropicals....) are in this soil (sometimes when I feel it, I add about 5% of worm humus). Only one of my trees has died (in my 18 months in the hobby) and I still wonder why....
It was the third tree in this composition (someone told me if the little jar was to save their ashes )



PS: I do not pretend to open a soil war, it's just my experience.

 

[Cajunrider]

Another hard lesson:
Right after bud breaks, bonsai are most vulnerable. Light frost, drying wind, failure to water or even over watering can kill them easily.
This spring I lost some bonsai that are valuable to me. A good live oak, a shantung maple, a tamarindus indica, a rainbow eucalyptus among them.

 

[HorseloverFat]

Hard lesson on soil: No matter how much in a hurry you are, take time to get the right soil for your trees. From now on, even in emergency situation with a damaged tree, I will tent the tree or do whatever necessary to keep it in stasis for a day or two to get the right soil. One type of soil does not fit all. It is very much species dependent.

Last year I was too much in a hurry to pot a rescued acer and potted it in wetter soil. I didn't have enough of the bonsai mix I used for other acer so I mixed in quite a bit of potting soil. It grew well last year so I thought I was OK. In a year the bark in the potting soil broke down, the soil became soggy and my tree suffers. I wound up having to repot yesterday in a more appropriate soil mix for acer.

A week ago, I potted my rainbow eucalyptus, which I knew require a higher water retentive soil, yet I put it in free draining soil because I had a tub full of it. Wrong move! I should have taken the time to screen some more bark and put in the mix. Sure enough after the repot, the tree suffers and now I have to sandwich the pot in between two layers of stuff to keep the moisture level of the tree in check until it recovers enough to be repotted again.

Bad soil kills trees!!

This ONE!!!! YES!!

 

[HorseloverFat]

Another hard lesson:
Right after bud breaks, bonsai are most vulnerable. Light frost, drying wind, failure to water or even over watering can kill them easily.
This spring I lost some bonsai that are valuable to me. A good live oak, a shantung maple, a tamarindus indica, a rainbow eucalyptus among them.

This is how I killed MOST of my trees that no longer exist...

Improper spring care after bud-break or repot..

THIS ONE TOO!!

 

[Cajunrider]

This is how I killed MOST of my trees that no longer exist...

Improper spring care after bud-break or repot..

THIS ONE TOO!!

In the case of my rainbow eucalyptus, it was a combo of 2 hard lessons. Last year I repotted it and put it in wrong soil. After some babying, it recovered and I thought things were all good. Then budbreak this spring and subsequent frost killed the buds. The tree, weakened from last year error, had no energy to rebud.

 

[Cajunrider]

Another hard lesson. Get paid before you ship your tree. The buyer has protection through PayPal etc., the seller has little.

 

[snowman04]

Another hard lesson. Get paid before you ship your tree. The buyer has protection through PayPal etc., the seller has little.

That should be the only way...

 

[namnhi]

Another hard lesson. Get paid before you ship your tree. The buyer has protection through PayPal etc., the seller has little.

Uncle, Tell us the deadbeat name so we can jump on him/her.

 

[vp999]

Another hard lesson. Get paid before you ship your tree. The buyer has protection through PayPal etc., the seller has little.

That’s F up.

 

[dbonsaiw]

Love this thread. There are just too many mistakes for me to list. Let's just say that almost everything I learned in bonsai was done the hard way. To me, that means I consistently killed and mangled trees to get to the newb spot I currently occupy. Truth be told, what I learned from books and the like was only internalized through the mistakes I made first hand. I've been through Merrigiolli's JM book multiple times, but needed to make the horrible chops that ruined trees before I could really start to understand what he was saying. I must have read Brian Van Fleet state that pruning produces better trunks in deciduous than bending a dozen times. But I needed to bend a seedling and grow it out for a few years to really understand what he was getting at (and also buy some "S" shape monstrosities). This is an ongoing process. More trees will die. I will ruin others than I am working on. But one day I will post a nice tree that I developed (or not).

If my trees had legs, they would run upon seeing me approach with knob cutters.

 

[Joe Dupre']

Cramming a tree into the "perfect" pot right before a show or before a fellow bonsai enthusiast comes to my garden. Another is collecting native trees that LOVE to shoot branches straight up. It's like herding cats.

 

[Carol 83]

Another hard lesson. Get paid before you ship your tree. The buyer has protection through PayPal etc., the seller has little.

Please tell us it was no one from here that stiffed you. So sorry to hear that there are people out there like that.